A tale of two (three) Jolteon?

 I was watching this Matoba Design video recently about the close of the WOTC era of Pokémon, and their last unfinished set, Jamboree. To sum up, some ex-WOTC employees suggested that their play test designs for Jamboree, the first-ever WOTC designed set, were scooped up after TPC revoked the license and published as part of Gen 3 TCG sets, specifically Sandstorm. As some supporting evidence to this, Sandstorm has a number of out-of-place Gen 1 and Gen 2 cards that don’t always match the desert theming. You can check out the disparity looking through the tableau of cards here. Click through the card comments as well for some more insight.

In particular, this Jolteon card was called out as being part of an original WOTC design. The published card is somewhat less powerful than the playtest card (Double Wigglytuff potential?? Free multi PlusPower??) but it seems plausible that perhaps this wasn’t the final version of the playtest card, or they really wanted to include the Flareon and Vaporeon, for which we have no playtest information, and felt it worthwhile to rework the Jolteon. Matoba Design also mentions there was some desire to reprint Gym-era cards and a restriction from TCP prohibiting it unless the card was reworked, which is why they (Matoba Design) used the promotional art from Lt. Surge’s Jolteon in their mockup of the Jamboree exclusive.

(Left) Sandstorm Jolteon. (Center) Early playtest card and (Right) artist's rendition of Jamboree Jolteon, both sourced from Matoba Design. Which would you rather have in your retro format?

Rather than just an apt art choice, could there be another link to Lt. Surge’s Jolteon? According to Daydream Holic Night, an early sneak peek at some cards from “Leader’s Stadium” (aka Gym Heroes) in CoroCoro comics contained this image of an insanely busted Lt. Surge’s Jolteon, which is very different from the Lt. Surge’s Jolteon we actually got. How many broken Jolteon designs have been reworked before release over the years?

(Left) September 1998 sneak peek of Lt. Surge's Jolteon, from Daydream Holic Night. (Right) Final version of Lt. Surge's Jolteon. Shockingly, this suggests Gym-era cards may have been playtested. 

What caught my attention is the text of its moves (Google Translated, so take with a grain of salt):

    L - 10 Damage - Flip a coin. If heads, this attack deals 20 more damage and the Defending Pokémon     is Paralyzed.

    LLC - 100 - Flip a coin for each of your opponent’s benched Pokémon. For each heads, deal 20            damage to that Pokémon. (Don’t apply Weakness or Resistance for benched Pokémon.)

Flipping coins for benched Pokémon at 20 per flip? Coupled with the very high overall attack damage, playtest Lt. Surge’s Jolteon seems to be a better match for Jamboree Jolteon than Jamboree Jolteon for Sandstorm Jolteon. This is purely speculative, of course, but I wonder if the WOTC dev team had access to scrapped or early TPC materials from which they drew ideas into their own set. I would love to see which ideas were tossed out in the early years and later recycled.